Learners will deepen their understanding and appreciation of ways in which race, ethnicity and cultural diversity have shaped American institutions, ideology, law, and social relationships from the colonial era to the present. Race and ethnicity are ideological and cultural categories that include all groups and individuals. Hence, this course is designed in significant part to take a broad look at the ideology of race and cultural diversity in America’s past and present. The primary focus is on the historical and social relationships among European Americans, Native Americans, African Americans, Latino/as, and Asian/Pacific Americans. Issues of race and ethnicity are examined across different ethno-cultural traditions in order to interweave diverse experiences into a larger synthesis of the meaning of race and ethnicity in American life. In this course, we conceive of “race” and “diversity” as references to the entire American population, even as we recognize that different groups have unique historical experiences resulting in distinctive and even fundamental cultural differences. We treat race and ethnicity as dynamic, complex ideological and cultural processes that shape all social institutions, belief systems, inter-group relationships, and individual experiences.

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從本節課中

Historical Legacies of Race in the United States

This module begins to address in greater detail a number of specific issues in the context of the United States: the legacy of slavery in the case of African Americans, the position of native Americans post colonization, and the particular circumstances of Asian American immigrants. These examples raise further complexity in the understanding of race and ethnicity.

教學方

James D. Anderson

腳本

Now, these operations, in fact, there's a recent letter or video by John Lewis, who's a congressman. That was very much a part of the civil rights movement. And the way in which he got started in civil rights, he talks about being in his home town in Troy, Alabama. And he and his brothers went to the library. And was told that they couldn't get a library card, because of the color of their skin, and because of their race. And that the library was for whites only. And he said that was the time when he realized how unjust, unfair and uneven things were and he committed himself to civil rights. In fact following that he wrote a letter to Martin Luther King, and became a very active leader in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. But even though some of these things were not really law, there were laws that made every aspect of interpersonal, intergroup relationships subject to both the legal and social laws of race. Because they were backed by some well known laws. One of the most important ones was the Supreme Court ruling in Plessy versus Ferguson. And when the court upheld as constitutional the notion of racial separation. And that the principle of separate but equal could be, was, in fact, deemed by the Supreme Court to be constitutional. And that really gave a lot of support, both formally and informally to the notion that people could be separated and treated differently because of the skin color in every way imagined. In 1956 for instance, an Alabama law barred blacks and whites from playing cards together, and dominos together, checkers, pool, football, baseball, basketball, or even golf together. A North Carolina law required factories and plants to maintain separate bathrooms from black employees. A Louisiana law mandated that movie theaters and all places of public entertainment separate white and black persons. So in every way that one could imagine there were either laws or customary practices that entered into and affected interpersonal and group relationships around very, very fundamental notions of race, and the meaning of race.